Maps of Difference: Canada, Women, and Travel

Pauline Carey is an actor, playwright, and fiction writer. She is the
author of Magic and What’s in a Name?

Wendy Roy, a researcher and teacher at the University of Saskatchewan,
has delivered an exhaustive inquiry into both geographical and
metaphorical mapping as shown in the written and illustrative work of
three women travellers at three different times in history. While Anna
Jameson, Mina Benson Hubbard, and Margaret Laurence explored physical,
cultural, and gender territories, they also re-mapped themselves.

Anna Jameson came from England to Upper Canada in the 1830s at the
request of her government-employed husband. After her initial
stereotypical reaction to the “Indians,” she made friends among the
Ojibwa (Anishinabe) and compared their way of life favourably to that of
colonial Toronto. She took pains to write their words phonetically,
inserted versions of their oral stories in her own work, and constantly
sketched what she saw.

Mina Benson Hubbard set out for Labrador with four Aboriginal male
guides in 1905 to complete an exploration started by her dead husband.
She kept a travel diary and later wrote a book that included her own
photographs and maps of the area, in which she named several places
after women. She did not learn the Innu language, and her thoughts seem
to have been more on her dead husband than on the Innu; but her
photographs were praised and her map-making was accepted with
astonishment.

When Margaret Laurence arrived in British Somaliland in 1951 as the
wife of an engineer, she dropped into a heavily imperialist culture that
she professed to abhor. She learned to accommodate but also learned the
Somali language, translated Somali songs and stories with the help of
collaborators, and incorporated her African experience in much of her
later writing.

Maps of Difference is a work of research, with pages littered with
quotations and numbers referring to 29 pages of notes and to other
publications. Yet beneath the academic necessities lie many intriguing
comments, enticing discursions into Aboriginal accounts of our intrepid
three and into the work of other women travellers, and a reassessment of
what it is and was to be an aware female traveller in foreign parts.